Smokin and Sewin'

This isn't a picture of my mom but it could have -she probably started smoking around this age

She died three years ago at age 83. I was sitting at the sewing machine this afternoon thinking about her and smiling.

Doris smoked everywhere-she never saw a problem with it. She grew up during a time when smoking was glamorous and acceptable.

Ava Gardner, Lauren Bacall, all the sirens smoked. In her heyday, Mom was a siren-she frequented the speakeasies of San Francisco when booze was illegal, wore minks to the country club and her sense of entitlement never left her.

She smoked walking in the streets, threw her cigarette on the ground in front of Albertsons, smoked in the state and national parks as she oohed and ahhed at the scenery and smoked her way around the world. She visited almost every country existing, smoking and enjoying it.

She was also a fabulous seamstress. Many hours of hearing that buzz-buzz-buzz -the needle climbing to it's goal-as she smoked and sewed.

That's what reminded me of her today.

I'm sewing my meager, sad little hems wondering how she did it. She had the machine working overtime and that cigarette burning in the ashtray. I'd hear a pause, for about one minute and the needle would roar to life again. Smoking and sewing-smoking and sewing...

No, she didn't die of lung cancer. Genetically gifted with healthy Nebraskan parents who lived till the age of 91 or 92-she never worried about the hazard's of smoking. In fact, as she got older and could not drive, her second husband, a non smoker used to make it hard for her to buy cigarettes-not much deterred her-he certainly didn't-she was a stubborn smoker and kept a stash of money so she could call me and I'd run to store to buy her a carton.

Ironically, she forgot she was a smoker. She slowly disappeared behind that hazy world of Alzheimer's-forgetting she ever smoked a cigarette.

Just smokin and sewin...

Our Earth-When do we start doing something???

I would not bring children into our world.

Would you want to be responsible for bringing children into a world that looks destined to destroy itself because of our own ignorance?

I look around me, and it isn't about politics anymore. It's about watching our earth heat up, massive disasters, unpredictable weather patterns, increasing destruction of our resources, drought, continued pollution by industry with little or no progress toward rectifying it, and the disappearance of animals on our earth.

I used to worry that it would be my daughter and son that faced the destruction of earth, or maybe their children.

Now I am not so sure it will be my own generation who dies a natural death.

All because humanity's collision course with reality has become unreal to most of us and our powers of denial are unbelievable.

If I read or hear one more conspiracy theory I will scream.

Get off the keyboard-text messages and cell phones and look around you.

Look around and ask yourself if you see change- ask yourself if it is good.

If you think it is you are part of the problem.

How long do you think we can trash, deconstruct, compromise, pollute, and essentially not clean up our mess and not pay the price of losing our planet?

What will we do?

Homophobia-America's last greatest value????

Republican Corruption in the past three years:

Ted Stevens

Larry Craig

Bob Ney

Tom Delay

Jack Ryan

Bob Livingston

Duke Cunningham

Sexual Scandals-with women

David Vitter

Jim Gibbons

Ed Schrock

Sexual scandals with men

Mark Foley

Bob Allen

Craig

Our culture loves moral outrage. Especially politicians. They step into dog shit repeatedly, trying to wipe the residue on the grass before anyone can smell it.

But we seem to have created our last bastion of outrage for our own homophobic fears.

Blase'-oh yeah, absolutely blase'-we have become when it comes to hook ups with hookers, adulterous affairs, even assaulting women in parking garages, like Jim Gibbons did and then smearing her reputation in the press aka Carl Rove style.

Nothing like destroying a woman to make a man feel powerful, eh?

Ah, but male sex? Outrage!

Our last bastion of morality.

Stealing money, selling out the citizens of the US, lying, spying, locking us up without a warrant, denying legal representation, ignoring our critical needs during time of disaster- *yawn*

Homophobia!! Welcome to the forefront of America's paranoid, judgement day act one of many more to come script...Welcome to Brokeback Mountain hell!!

uncharted, american stuff-headlong into whatever...

The American world is one big buffet of polarization, excess and deprivation, obsessiveness and denial, riotous noise and dead silence.

We look for bombs in soda cans, mysterious poison powders in dumpsters, terrorists in skin color and we rarely learn from either our wisdom or are mistakes.

Whether it is interrment camps for Japanese-American citizens, indefinite lock-ups for Americans of middle eastern descent or massive round-ups of Mexican-Americans, we look for the boogy man in all that is not white.

Like a beached whale taking it's last gasp in a swirling mass of air, so foreign and lethal, panicked, we continue grasping for the familiar water. Our instincts to grasp the microscopic, almost invisable fishing line, unseeable, unable to hold the massive weight of fear we collectively produce creates a repeated pattern of attack and withdraw, attack and withdraw.

Hurricane Katrina reduced a city to rubble. All but wiped out a geographical region. Unprepared, using our denial, we created the menu and nature chose the main course.

If human spirit exists, we can transcend the panic mode of our existence and deal with reality rather than rhetoric.

Let's look beyond ourselves, now, rather than clinging and pushing our way to extinction.

Senator Craig's dueling selves...

Senator Craig's bathroom foray almost seemed destined to bring him the relief he must have, on some level, sought in a big destructive way.

A man who decried same sex relationships, strongly espoused family families and preached the christian pathway may as well have detonated a bomb inside his pants.

Why would he do it? Did you see his wife? The image of a Midwestern woman, full -round the middle, maternal material-oozing of family and mundane womanly living.

I find it sad to view a person battling the incongruencies of life-the feelings connected with the shame and the guilt. The denial-which has to be eating away at both selves-and I ask, "Did anyone ever know this man if he doesn't know himself?

Were those who love him surprised or did they already know who he is? Did they know it before he did? Can you imagine keeping his secret for years and years?

I don't think our world is such a condemning place that Mr. Craig would not have been able to live his lifestyle, work and be a productive citizen with some joy.

He is an older man now facing questions and answers which could lead him to that joy -I hate to think of what he considers alternatives.

We all have our own truths. We decide if we live them or not. Facing our own truths isn't without pain, discomfort or anguish. Most of us choose the Senator's way-not to face them at all-until they face us -